Wednesday, November 29, 2006 -- This is an excerpt from the Sol Feinstone
Lecture on 'The Meaning of Freedom', delivered by Bill Moyers at the United
States Military Academy on November 15, 2006.

Many of you will be heading for Iraq. I have never been a soldier myself,
never been tested under fire, never faced hard choices between duty and feeling,
or duty and conscience, under deadly circumstances. I will never know if I have
the courage to be shot at, or to shoot back, or the discipline to do my duty
knowing the people who dispatched me to kill -- or be killed -- had no idea of
the moral abyss into which they were plunging me.

I have tried to learn about war from those who know it best: veterans, the
real experts. But they have been such reluctant reporters of the experience. My
father-in-law, Joe Davidson, was 37 years old with two young daughters when war
came in 1941; he enlisted and served in the Pacific, but I never succeeded in
getting him to describe what it was like to be in harm’s way. My uncle came home
from the Pacific after his ship had been sunk, taking many friends down with it,
and he would look away and change the subject when I asked him about it. One of
my dearest friends, who died this year at 90, returned from combat in Europe as
if he had taken a vow of silence about the dark and terrifying things that came
home with him, uninvited.

Curious about this, some years ago I produced for PBS a documentary called
"D-Day to the Rhine." With a camera crew, I accompanied several veterans of
World War II who, for the first time, were returning together to the path of
combat that carried them from the landing at Normandy in 1944 into the heart of
Germany. Members of their families were along this time -- wives, grown sons and
daughters -- and they told me that until now, on this trip -- 45 years after
D-Day -- their husbands and fathers rarely talked about their combat
experiences. They had come home, locked their memories in their mind’s attic,
and hung a "no trespassing" sign on it. Even as they retraced their steps almost
half a century later, I would find these aging GIs, standing alone and silent on
the very spot where a buddy had been killed, or they themselves had killed, or
where they had been taken prisoner, a German soldier standing over them with a
Mauser pointed right between their eyes, saying: "For you, the war is over." As
they tried to tell the story, the words choked in their throats. The stench, the
vomit, the blood, the fear: What outsider -- journalist or kin -- could imagine
the demons still at war in their heads?

What I remember most vividly from that trip is the opening scene of the film:
Jose Lopez -- the father of two, who had lied about his age to get into the Army
(he was too old), went ashore at Normandy, fought his way across France and
Belgium with a water-cooled machine gun, rose to the rank of sergeant, and
received the Congressional Medal of Honor after single-handedly killing 100
German troops in the Battle of the Bulge -- Jose Lopez, back on Omaha Beach at
age 79, quietly saying to me: "I was really very, very afraid. That I want to
scream. I want to cry and we see other people was laying wounded and screaming
and everything and it’s nothing you could do. We could see them groaning in the
water and we keep walking" -- and then, moving away from the camera, dropping to
his knees, his hands clasped, his eyes wet, as it all came back, memories so
excruciating there were no words for them.

The Poetry Of War

Over the year I turned to the poets for help in understanding the realities
of war; it is from the poets we outsiders most often learn what you soldiers
experience. I admired your former superintendent, General William Lennox, who
held a doctorate in literature and taught poetry classes here because, he said,
"poetry is a great vehicle to teach cadets as much as anyone can what combat is
like." So it is.

From the opening lines of the Iliad:

"Rage, Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ Son Achilles ... hurling down to the
House of Death so many souls, great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies
carrion for the dogs and birds ..."

... to Wilfred Owen’s pained cry from the trenches of France:

"I am the enemy you killed, my friend ..."

... to W. D. Ehrhart’s staccato recitation of the:

"Barely tolerable conglomeration of mud, heat, sweat, dirt, rain, pain, fear
... we march grinding under the weight of heavy packs, feet dialed to the ground
... we wonder ..."

Poets, with their empathy and evocation, open to bystanders what lies buried
in the soldier’s soul.

Those of you soon to be leading others in combat may wish to take a
metaphorical detour to the Hindenburg Line of World War I, where the officer and
poet Wilfred Owen, a man of extraordinary courage who was killed a week before
the Armistice, wrote: "I came out in order to help these boys -- directly by
leading them as well as an officer can; indirectly, by watching their sufferings
that I may speak of them as well as a pleader can."

People in power should be required to take classes in the poetry of war. As a
presidential assistant during the early escalation of the war in Vietnam, I
remember how the President blanched when the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff said it would take one million fighting men and 10 years really to win in
Vietnam, but even then the talk of war was about policy, strategy, numbers and
budgets, not severed limbs and eviscerated bodies.

That experience, and the experience 40 years later of watching another White
House go to war, also relying on inadequate intelligence, exaggerated claims and
premature judgments, keeping Congress in the dark while wooing a gullible press,
cheered on by partisans, pundits, and editorial writers safely divorced from
realities on the ground, ended any tolerance I might have had for those who
advocate war from the loftiness of the pulpit, the safety of a laptop, the
comfort of a think tank, or the glamor of a television studio. Watching one day
on C-Span as one member of Congress after another took to the floor to praise
our troops in Iraq, I was reminded that I could only name three members of
Congress who have a son or daughter in the military. How often we hear the most
vigorous argument for war from those who count on others of valor to fight it.
As General William Tecumseh Sherman said after the Civil War: "It is only those
who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks a nd groans of the wounded
who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation."

Remembering Emily Perez

Rupert Murdoch comes to mind -- only because he was in the news last week
talking about Iraq. In the months leading up to the invasion, Murdoch turned the
dogs of war loose in the corridors of his media empire, and they howled for
blood, although not their own. Murdoch himself said, just weeks before the
invasion, that: "The greatest thing to come of this to the world economy, if you
could put it that way [as you can, if you are a media mogul], would be $20 a
barrel for oil." Once the war is behind us, Rupert Murdoch said: "The whole
world will benefit from cheaper oil, which will be a bigger stimulus than
anything else."

Today Murdoch says he has no regrets, that he still believes it was right "to
go in there," and that "from a historical perspective" the U.S. death toll in
Iraq was "minute."

"Minute."

The word ricocheted in my head when I heard it. I had just been reading about
Emily Perez. Your Emily Perez: Second Lieutenant Perez, the first woman of color
to become a command sergeant major in the history of the Academy, and the first
woman graduate to die in Iraq. I had been in Washington when word of her death
made the news, and because she had lived there before coming to West Point, the
Washington press told us a lot about her. People remembered her as "a little
superwoman" -- straight A’s, choir member, charismatic, optimistic, a friend to
so many; she had joined the medical service because she wanted to help people.
The obituary in the Washington Post said she had been a ball of fire at the
Peace Baptist Church, where she helped start an HIV-AIDS ministry after some of
her own family members contracted the virus. Now accounts of her funeral here at
West Point were reporting that some of you wept as you contemplated the loss of
so vibrant an officer.

"Minute?" I don't think so. Historical perspective or no. So when I arrived
today, I asked the Academy’s historian, Steve Grove, to take me where Emily
Perez is buried, in Section 36 of your cemetery, below Storm King Mountain,
overlooking the Hudson River. Standing there, on sacred American soil hallowed
all the more by the likes of Lieutenant Perez so recently returned, I thought
that to describe their loss as "minute" -- even from a historical perspective --
is to underscore the great divide that has opened in America between those who
advocate war while avoiding it, and those who have the courage to fight it
without ever knowing what it’s all about.

We were warned of this by our founders. They had put themselves in jeopardy
by signing the Declaration of Independence; if they had lost, that parchment
could have been their death warrant, for they were traitors to the Crown and
likely to be hanged. In the fight for freedom, they had put themselves on the
line -- not just their fortunes and sacred honor but their very persons, their
lives. After the war, forming a government and understanding both the nature of
war and human nature, they determined to make it hard to go to war except to
defend freedom; war for reasons save preserving the lives and liberty of your
citizens should be made difficult to achieve, they argued.

Here is John Jay’s passage in Federalist No. 4:

"It is too true, however disgraceful it may be to human nature, that nations
in general will make war whenever they have a prospect of getting anything by
it; nay, absolute monarchs will often make war when their nations are to get
nothing by it, but for the purposes and objects merely personal, such as thirst
for military glory, revenge for personal affronts, ambition, or private compacts
to aggrandize or support their particular families or partisans. These and a
variety of other motives, which affect only the mind of the sovereign, often
lead him to engage in wars not sanctified by justice or the voice and interests
of his people."

And here, a few years later, is James Madison, perhaps the most deliberative
mind of that generation in assaying the dangers of an unfettered executive prone
to war:

"In war, a physical force is to be created, and it is the executive will
which is to direct it. In war, the public treasures are to be unlocked, and it
is the executive hand which is to dispense them. In war, the honors and
emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage
under which they are to be enjoyed. It is in war, finally, that laurels are to
be gathered; and it is the executive brow they are to encircle. The strongest
passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice,
vanity, the honorable or venial love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the
desire and duty of peace."

I want to be clear on this: Vietnam did not make me a dove. Nor has Iraq; I
am no pacifist. But they have made me study the Constitution more rigorously,
both as journalist and citizen.

Again, James Madison:

"In no part of the Constitution is more wisdom to be found, than in the
clause which confides the question of war and peace to the legislature, and not
to the executive department. Beside the objection to such a mixture to
heterogeneous powers, the trust and the temptation would be too great for any
one man."

Twice in 40 years, we have now gone to war paying only lip service to those
warnings; the first war we lost, the second is a bloody debacle, and both rank
among the great blunders in our history. It is impossible for soldiers to
sustain in the field what cannot be justified in the Constitution; asking them
to do so puts America at war with itself. So when the Vice President of the
United States says it doesn't matter what the people think, he and the President
intend to prosecute the war anyway, he is committing heresy against the
fundamental tenets of the American political order.

An Army Born in Revolution

This is a tough subject to address when so many of you may be heading for
Iraq. I would prefer to speak of sweeter things. But I also know that 20 or 30
years from now, any one of you may be the Chief of Staff, or the National
Security Adviser, or even the President -- after all, two of your boys, Grant
and Eisenhower, did make it from West Point to the White House. And that being
the case, it’s more important than ever that citizens and soldiers -- and
citizen-soldiers -- honestly discuss and frankly consider the kind of country
you are serving, and the kind of organization to which you are dedicating your
lives. You are, after all, the heirs of an army born in the American Revolution,
whose radicalism we consistently underestimate.

No one understood this radicalism -- no one in uniform did more to help us
define freedom in a profoundly American way -- than the man whose monument here
at West Point I also asked to visit today -- Thaddeus Kosciuszko.

I first became intrigued by Kosciuszko over 40 years ago when I arrived in
Washington. Lafayette Park, on Pennsylvania Avenue, across from the White House,
hosts several statues of military heroes who came to fight for our independence
in the American Revolution. For seven years, either looking down on these
figures from my office at the Peace Corps, or walking across Lafayette Park to
my office in the White House, I was reminded of these men who came voluntarily
to fight for American independence from the monarchy. The most compelling, for
me, was the depiction of Kosciuszko. On one side of the statue he is directing a
soldier back to the battlefield, and on the other side, wearing an American
uniform, he is freeing a bound soldier, representing America’s revolutionaries.

Kosciuszko had been born in Lithuania-Poland, where he was trained as an
engineer and artillery officer. Arriving in the 13 colonies in 1776, he broke
down in tears when he read the Declaration of Independence. The next year, he
helped engineer the Battle of Saratoga, organizing the river and land
fortifications that put Americans in the stronger position. George Washington
then commissioned him to build the original fortifications for West Point. Since
his monument dominates the point here at the Academy, this part of the story you
must know well.

But what many don't realize about Kosciuszko is the depth of his commitment
to republican ideals and human equality. One historian called him "a mystical
visionary of human rights." Thomas Jefferson wrote that Kosciuszko was "as pure
a son of liberty as I have ever known." That phrase of Jefferson’s is often
quoted, but if you read the actual letter, Jefferson goes on to say: "And of
that liberty which is to go to all, and not to the few and the rich alone."

There is the clue to the meaning of freedom as Thaddeus Kosciuszko saw it.

After the American Revolution, he returned to his homeland, what was then the
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In 1791 the Poles adopted their celebrated May
Constitution -- Europe’s first codified national constitution (and the second
oldest in the world, after our own.) The May Constitution established political
equality between the middle class and the nobility, and also partially abolished
serfdom by giving civil rights to the peasants, including the right to state
protection from landlord abuses. The autocrats and nobles of Russia feared such
reforms, and in 1794, when the Russians sought to prevent their spread by
partitioning the Commonwealth, Kosciuszko led an insurrection. His untrained
peasant forces were armed mostly with single-blade sickles, but they won several
early battles in fierce hand-to-hand fighting, until they were finally
overwhelmed. Badly injured, Kosciuszko was taken prisoner and held for two years
in St. Petersburg, and that was the end of the Polish Commonwealth, which had
stood, by the way, as one of Europe’s leading centers of religious liberty.

Upon his release from prison, Kosciuszko came back to the United States and
began a lasting friendship with Jefferson, who called him his "most intimate and
beloved friend." In 1798, he wrote a will leaving his American estate to
Jefferson, urging him to use it to purchase the freedom and education of his
[Jefferson’s] own slaves, or, as Jefferson interpreted it, of "as many of the
children of bondage in this country as it should be adequate to." For this
émigré, as for so many who would come later, the meaning of freedom included a
passion for universal justice. In his Act of Insurrection at the outset of the
1794 uprising, Kosciuszko wrote of the people’s "sacred rights to liberty,
personal security and property." Note the term property here. For Jefferson’s
"pursuit of happiness" Kosciuszko substituted Locke’s notion of property rights.
But it’s not what you think: The goal was not simply to protect "private
property" from public interference (as it is taught today), but rather to secure
productive property for all as a right to citizenship. It’s easy to forget the
difference when huge agglomerations of personal wealth are defended as a sacred
right of liberty, as they are today with the gap between the rich and poor in
America greater than it’s been in almost one hundred years. Kosciuszko --
General Kosciuszko, from tip to toe a military man -- was talking about
investing the people with productive resources. Yes, freedom had to be won on
the battlefield, but if freedom did not lead to political, social and economic
opportunity for all citizens, freedom’s meaning could not be truly realized.

Think about it: A Polish general from the old world, infusing the new nation
with what would become the marrow of the American Dream. Small wonder that
Kosciuszko was often called a "hero of two worlds" or that just 25 years ago, in
1981, when Polish farmers, supported by the Roman Catholic Church, won the right
to form an independent union, sending shockwaves across the Communist empire,
Kosciuszko’s name was heard in the victory speeches -- his egalitarian soul
present at yet another revolution for human freedom and equal rights.

After Jefferson won the presidency in 1800, Kosciuszko wrote him a touching
letter advising him to be true to his principles: "do not forget in your post --
be always a virtuous Republican with justice and probity, without pomp and
ambition -- in a word, be Jefferson and my friend." Two years later, Jefferson
signed into being this professional officers school, on the site first laid out
as a fortress by his friend, the general from Poland.

A Paradox Of Liberty

Every turn in American history confronts us with paradox, and this one is no
exception. Here was Jefferson, known for his vigorous and eloquent opposition to
professional armies, presiding over the establishment of West Point. It’s a
paradox that suits you cadets to a T, because you yourselves represent a paradox
of liberty. You are free men and women, who of your own free choice have joined
an institution dedicated to protecting a free nation, but in the process you
have voluntarily agreed to give up, for a specific time, a part of your own
liberty. An army is not a debating society, and neither in the field or in
headquarters does it ask for a show of hands on whether orders should be obeyed.
That is undoubtedly a necessary idea, but for you it complicates the already
tricky question of "the meaning of freedom."

I said earlier that our founders did not want the power of war to reside in a
single man. Many were also dubious about having any kind of regular, or as they
called it, "standing" army at all. Standing armies were hired supporters of
absolute monarchs and imperial tyrants. The men drafting the Constitution were
steeped in classical and historical learning. They recalled how Caesar in
ancient times -- and Oliver Cromwell in more recent times -- had used the
conquering armies they had led to make themselves dictators. They knew how the
Roman legions had made and unmade emperors, and how Ottoman rulers of the
Turkish Empire had supported their tyrannies on the shoulders of formidable
elite warriors. Wherever they looked in history, they saw an alliance between
enemies of freedom in palaces and in officer corps drawn from the ranks of
nobility, bound by a warrior code that stressed honor and bravery -- but also
dedication to the sovereign and the sovereign’s god, and distrust am ounting to
contempt for the ordinary run of the sovereign’s subjects.

The colonial experience with British regulars, first as allies in the French
and Indian Wars, and then as enemies, did not increase American respect for the
old system of military leadership. Officers were chosen and promoted on the
basis of aristocratic connections, commissions were bought, and ineptitude was
too often tolerated. The lower ranks were often rootless alumni of jails and
workhouses, lured or coerced into service by the paltry pay and chance of
adventure -- brutally hard types, kept in line by brutally harsh discipline.

Not exactly your model for the army of a republic of free citizens.

What the framers came up with was another novelty. The first battles of the
Revolution were fought mainly by volunteer militia from the states, such as
Vermont’s Green Mountain Boys, the most famous militia then. They were gung-ho
for revolution, and flushed with a fighting spirit. But in the end, they were no
substitute for the better-trained regiments of the Continental line and the
French regulars sent over by France’s king after the alliance of 1778. The view
nonetheless persisted that in times of peace, only a small permanent army would
be needed to repel invasions -- unlikely, except from Canada -- and deal with
the frontier Indians. When and if a real crisis came, it was believed,
volunteers would flock to the colors like the armed men of Greek mythology who
sprang from dragon’s teeth planted in the ground by a divinely approved hero.
The real safety of the nation in any hour of crisis would rest with men who
spent most of their working lives behind the plow or in the workshop. And this
was long before the huge conscript armies of the 19th and 20th centuries made
that a commonplace fact.

And who would be in the top command of both that regular force and of
volunteer forces when actually called into federal service? None other than the
top elected civil official of the government, the President. Think about that
for a moment. The professional army fought hard and long to create a system of
selecting and keeping officers on the basis of proven competence, not
popularity. But the highest commander of all served strictly at the pleasure of
the people, and had to submit his contract for renewal every four years.

And what of the need for trained and expert leadership at all the levels of
command which quickly became apparent as the tools and tactics of warfare grew
more sophisticated in a modernizing world? That’s where West Point came in,
filling a need that could no longer be ignored. But what a special military
academy it was! We tend to forget that the West Point curriculum was heavily
tilted toward engineering; in fact, it was one of the nation’s first engineering
colleges, and it was publicly supported and free. That’s what made it attractive
to young men like Hiram Ulysses Grant, familiarly known as "Sam," who wasn't
anxious to be a soldier, but wanted to get somewhere more promising than his
father’s Ohio farm. Hundreds like Grant came to West Point, and left to use
their civil engineering skills in a country badly needing them, some in civil
life after serving out an enlistment, but many right there in uniform. It was
the army that explored, mapped and surveyed the wagon and railroad routes to the
west, starting with the Corps of Exploration under Lewis and Clark sent out by
the protean Mr. Jefferson. It was the army that had a hand in clearing rivers of
snags and brush and building dams that allowed steamboats to avoid rapids. It
was the army that put up lighthouses in the harbors and whose exhaustive
geologic and topographic surveys were important contributions to publicly
supported scientific research -- AND to economic development -- in the young
republic.

All of this would surely have pleased General Kosciuszko, who believed in a
society that leaves no one out. Indeed, add all these facts together and what
you come up with is a portrait of something new under the sun -- a peacetime
army working directly with and for the civil society in improving the nation so
as to guarantee the greater opportunities for individual success inherent in the
promise of democracy. And a wartime army in which temporary citizen-solders were
-- and still are -- led by long-term professional citizen-soldiers who were
molded out of the same clay as those they command. And all of them led from the
top by the one political figure chosen by the entire national electorate. This
arrangement -- this bargain between the men with the guns and the citizens who
provide the guns -- is the heritage passed on to you by the revolutionaries who
fought and won America’s independence and then swore fidelity to a civil compact
that survives today, despite tumultuous mom ents and perilous passages.

West Point's Importance

Once again we encounter a paradox: Not all our wars were on the side of
freedom. The first that seriously engaged the alumni of West Point was the
Mexican War, which was not a war to protect our freedoms but to grab land --
facts are facts -- and was not only bitterly criticized by part of the civilian
population, but even looked on with skepticism by some graduates like Grant
himself. Still, he not only fought well in it, but it was for him, as well as
for most of the generals on both sides in the impending Civil War, an unequalled
training school and rehearsal stage.

When the Civil War itself came, it offered an illustration of how the meaning
of freedom isn't always easy to pin down. From the point of view of the North,
the hundreds of Southern West Pointers who resigned to fight for the Confederacy
-- Robert E. Lee included -- were turning against the people’s government that
had educated and supported them. They were traitors. But from the Southern point
of view, they were fighting for the freedom of their local governments to leave
the Union when, as they saw it, it threatened their way of life. Their way of
life tragically included the right to hold other men in slavery.

The Civil War, nonetheless, confirmed the importance of West Point training.
European military observers were amazed at the skill with which the better
generals on both sides, meaning for the most part West Pointers and not
political appointees, maneuvered huge armies of men over vast areas of difficult
terrain, used modern technologies like the railroad and the telegraph to
coordinate movements and accumulate supplies, and made the best use of
newly-developed weapons. The North had more of these advantages, and when the
final victory came, adulation and admiration were showered on Grant and Sherman,
who had come to a realistic and unromantic understanding of modern war,
precisely because they had not been steeped in the mythologies of a warrior
caste. Their triumph was seen as vindication of how well the army of a democracy
could work. Just as Lincoln, the self-educated rail-splitter, had provided a
civilian leadership that also proved him the equal of any potentate on the gl
obe.

After 1865, the army shrank, as its chief engagement was now in wiping out
the last vestiges of Indian resistance to their dispossession and subjugation:
One people’s advance became another’s annihilation, and one of the most shameful
episodes of our history. In 1898, the army was briefly used for the first effort
in exporting democracy -- an idea that does not travel well in military
transports -- when it warred with Spain to help the Cubans complete a war for
independence that had been in progress for three years. The Cubans found their
liberation somewhat illusory, however, when the United States made the island a
virtual protectorate, and allowed it to be ruled by a corrupt dictator.

Americans also lifted the yoke of Spain from the Filipinos, only to learn
that they did not want to exchange it for one stamped ‘Made in the USA.' It took
a three-year war, during which the army killed several thousand so-called
"insurgents", before their leader was captured and the Filipinos were cured of
the illusion that independence meant ... well, independence. I bring up these
reminders not to defame the troops. Their actions were supported by a majority
of the American people even in a progressive phase of our political history
(though there was some principled and stiff opposition.) Nonetheless, we have to
remind ourselves that the armed forces can't be expected to be morally much
better than the people who send them into action, and that when honorable
behavior comes into conflict with racism, honor is usually the loser unless
people such as yourself fight to maintain it.

Our brief participation in the First World War temporarily expanded the army,
helped by a draft that had also proven necessary in the Civil War. But rapid
demobilization was followed by a long period of ever-shrinking military budgets,
especially for the land forces.

Not until World War II did the Army again take part in such a long, bloody,
and fateful conflict as the Civil War had been, and like the Civil War it opened
an entirely new period in American history. The incredibly gigantic mobilization
of the entire nation, the victory it produced, and the ensuing 60 years of wars,
quasi-wars, mini-wars, secret wars, and a virtually permanent crisis created a
superpower and forever changed the nation’s relationship to its armed forces,
confronting us with problems we have to address, no matter how unsettling it may
be to do so in the midst of yet another war.

The Bargain

The Armed Services are no longer stepchildren in budgetary terms.
Appropriations for defense and defense-related activities (like veterans’ care,
pensions, and debt service) remind us that the costs of war continue long after
the fighting ends. Objections to ever-swelling defensive expenditures are,
except in rare cases, a greased slide to political suicide. It should be
troublesome to you as professional soldiers that elevation to the pantheon of
untouchable icons -- right there alongside motherhood, apple pie and the flag --
permits a great deal of political lip service to replace genuine efforts to
improve the lives and working conditions -- in combat and out -- of those who
serve.

Let me cut closer to the bone. The chickenhawks in Washington, who at this
very moment are busily defending you against supposed "insults" or betrayals by
the opponents of the war in Iraq, are likewise those who have cut budgets for
medical and psychiatric care; who have been so skimpy and late with pay and with
provision of necessities that military families in the United States have had to
apply for food stamps; who sent the men and women whom you may soon be
commanding into Iraq under-strength, under-equipped, and unprepared for dealing
with a kind of war fought in streets and homes full of civilians against enemies
undistinguishable from non-combatants; who have time and again broken promises
to the civilian National Guardsmen bearing much of the burden by canceling their
redeployment orders and extending their tours.

You may or may not agree on the justice and necessity of the war itself, but
I hope that you will agree that flattery and adulation are no substitute for
genuine support. Much of the money that could be directed to that support has
gone into high-tech weapons systems that were supposed to produce a new, mobile,
compact "professional" army that could easily defeat the armies of any other two
nations combined, but is useless in a war against nationalist or religious
guerrilla uprisings that, like it or not, have some support, coerced or
otherwise, among the local population. We learned this lesson in Vietnam, only
to see it forgotten or ignored by the time this administration invaded Iraq,
creating the conditions for a savage sectarian and civil war with our soldiers
trapped in the middle, unable to discern civilian from combatant, where it is
impossible to kill your enemy faster than rage makes new ones.

And who has been the real beneficiary of creating this high-tech army called
to fight a war conceived and commissioned and cheered on by politicians and
pundits not one of whom ever entered a combat zone? One of your boys answered
that: Dwight Eisenhower, class of 1915, who told us that the real winners of the
anything at any price philosophy would be "the military-industrial complex."

I want to contend that the American military systems that evolved in the
early days of this republic rested on a bargain between the civilian authorities
and the armed services, and that the army has, for the most part, kept its part
of the bargain and that, at this moment, the civilian authorities whom you
loyally obey, are shirking theirs. And before you assume that I am calling for
an insurrection against the civilian deciders of your destinies, hear me out,
for that is the last thing on my mind.

You have kept your end of the bargain by fighting well when called upon, by
refusing to become a praetorian guard for a reigning administration at any time,
and for respecting civil control at all times. For the most part, our military
leaders have made no serious efforts to meddle in politics. The two most notable
cases were General George McClellan, who endorsed a pro-Southern and pro-slavery
policy in the first year of the war and was openly contemptuous of Lincoln. But
Lincoln fired him in 1862, and when McClellan ran for President two years later,
the voting public handed him his hat. Douglas MacArthur’s attempt to dictate his
own China policy in 1951 ran head-on into the resolve of Harry Truman, who,
surviving a firestorm of hostility, happily watched a MacArthur boomlet for the
Republican nomination for the Presidency fizzle out in 1952.

On the other side of the ledger, however, I believe that the bargain has not
been kept. The last time Congress declared war was in 1941. Since then,
presidents of the United States, including the one I served, have gotten
Congress, occasionally under demonstrably false pretenses, to suspend
Constitutional provisions that required them to get the consent of the people’s
representatives in order to conduct a war. They have been handed a blank check
to send the armed forces into action at their personal discretion and on dubious
Constitutional grounds.

Furthermore, the current President has made extra-Constitutional claims of
authority by repeatedly acting as if he were Commander-in-Chief of the entire
nation and not merely of the armed forces. Most dangerously to our moral honor
and to your own welfare in the event of capture, he has likewise ordered the
armed forces to violate clear mandates of the Uniform Code of Military Justice
and the Geneva Conventions by claiming a right to interpret them at his
pleasure, so as to allow indefinite and secret detentions and torture. These
claims contravene a basic principle usually made clear to recruits from their
first day in service -- that they may not obey an unlawful order. The President
is attempting to have them violate that long-standing rule by personal
definitions of what the law says and means.

There is yet another way the chickenhawks are failing you. In the October
issue of the magazine of the California Nurses Association, you can read a long
report on "The Battle at Home." In veterans’ hospitals across the country -- and
in a growing number of ill-prepared, under-funded psych and primary care clinics
as well -- the report says that nurses "have witnessed the guilt, rage,
emotional numbness, and tormented flashbacks of GIs just back from Iraq." Yet "a
returning vet must wait an average of 165 days for a VA decision on initial
disability benefits," and an appeal can take up to three years. Just in the
first quarter of this year, the VA treated 20,638 Iraq veterans for
post-traumatic stress disorder, and faces a backlog of 400,000 cases. This is
reprehensible.

I repeat: These are not palatable topics for soldiers about to go to war; I
would like to speak of sweeter things. But freedom means we must face reality:
"You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free." Free enough,
surely, to think for yourselves about these breaches of contract that crudely
undercut the traditions of an army of free men and women who have bound
themselves voluntarily to serve the nation even unto death.

The Voice Of Conscience

What, then, can you do about it if disobedience to the chain of command is
ruled out?

For one, you didn't give up your freedom to vote, nor did you totally quit
your membership in civil society, when you put on the uniform, even though, as
Eisenhower said, you did accept "certain inhibitions" at the time. He said that
when questioned about MacArthur’s dismissal, and he made sure his own uniform
was back in the trunk before his campaign in 1952. It has been most encouraging,
by the way, to see veterans of Iraq on the campaign trail in our recent
elections.

Second, remember that there are limitations to what military power can do.
Despite the valor and skills of our fighting forces, some objectives are not
obtainable at a human, diplomatic, and financial cost that is acceptable. Our
casualties in Iraq are not "minute" and the cost of the war has been projected
by some sources to reach $2 trillion dollars. Sometimes, in the real world, a
truce is the most honorable solution to conflict. Dwight Eisenhower -- who is a
candidate for my favorite West Point graduate of the 20th century -- knew that
when, in 1953, he went to Korea and accepted a stalemate rather than carrying
out his bluff of using nuclear weapons. That was the best that could be done,
and it saved more years of stalemate and casualties. Douglas MacArthur announced
in 1951 that "there was no substitute for victory." But in the wars of the 21st
century, there are alternative meanings to victory, and alternative ways to
achieve them. Especially in tracking down and el iminating terrorists, we need
to change our metaphor from a "war on terror" -- what, pray tell, exactly is
that? -- to the mindset of Interpol tracking down master criminals through
intense global cooperation among nations, or the FBI stalking the Mafia, or
local police determined to quell street gangs without leveling the entire
neighborhood in the process. Help us to think beyond a "war on terror" -- which
politicians could wage without end, with no measurable way to judge its
effectiveness, against stateless enemies who hope we will destroy the
neighborhood, creating recruits for their side -- to counter-terrorism modeled
on extraordinary police work.

Third, don't let your natural and commendable loyalty to comrades-in-arms
lead you into thinking that criticism of the mission you are on spells lack of
patriotism. Not every politician who flatters you is your ally. Not everyone who
believes that war is the wrong choice to some problems is your enemy. Blind
faith in bad leadership is not patriotism. In the words of G.K. Chesterton: "To
say my country, right or wrong, is something no patriot would utter except in
dire circumstance; it is like saying my mother drunk or sober." Patriotism means
insisting on our political leaders being sober, strong, and certain about what
they are doing when they put you in harm’s way.

Fourth, be more prepared to accept the credibility and integrity of those who
disagree about the war, even if you do not agree with their positions. I say
this as a journalist, knowing it is tempting in the field to denounce or despise
reporters who ask nosy questions or file critical reports. But their first duty
as reporters is to get as close as possible to the verifiable truth and report
it to the American people -- for your sake. If there is mismanagement and
incompetence, exposing it is more helpful to you than paeans to candy given to
the locals. I trust you are familiar with the study done for the Army in 1989 by
the historian, William Hammond. He examined press coverage in Korea and Vietnam,
and found that it was not the cause of disaffection at home; what disturbed
people at home was the death toll; when casualties jumped, public support
dropped. Over time, he said, the reporting was vindicated. In fact, "the press
reports were often more accurate than the public statements of the
administration in portraying the situation in Vietnam." Take note: The American
people want the truth about how their sons and daughters are doing in Iraq and
what they’re up against, and that is a good thing.

Finally, and this above all -- a lesson I wish I had learned earlier. If you
rise in the ranks to important positions -- or even if you don’t -- speak the
truth as you see it, even if the questioner is a higher authority with a clear
preference for one and only one answer. It may not be the way to promote your
career; it can, in fact, harm it. Among my military heroes of this war are the
generals who frankly told the President and his advisers that their information
and their plans were both incomplete and misleading -- and who paid the price of
being ignored and bypassed and possibly frozen forever in their existing ranks:
men like General Eric K. Shinseki, another son of West Point. It is not easy to
be honest -- and fair -- in a bureaucratic system. But it is what free men and
women have to do. Be true to your principles, General Kosciuszko reminded Thomas
Jefferson. If doing so exposes the ignorance and arrogance of power, you may be
doing more to save the nation than e xploits in combat can achieve.

I know the final rule of the military Code of Conduct is already written in
your hearts: "I am an American, fighting for freedom, responsible for my
actions, and dedicated to the principles which made my country free ..." The
meaning of freedom begins with the still, small voice of conscience, when each
of us decides what we will live, or die, for.

I salute your dedication to America and I wish all of you good luck.

Bill Moyers is deeply grateful to his colleagues Bernard A Weisberger,
Professor Emeritus of History at The University of Chicago, and Lew Daly, Senior
Fellow of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, for their contributions
to this speech.